The last pages of my novel sought to capture the lovers 20 years later as they reconnect and tell each other that, despite the years, they’ve forgotten nothing. This was not at all what I had envisaged for the ending. I recall that when discussing his plans for the film, Guadagnino had told me that he would end the film with a shot of young Elio weeping before the camera. What a film director does is make the statue move. What I do is chisel a statue down to its finest, most elusive details.
What I do as a writer, and what Guadagnino does as a film director, is more than speak two different languages. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.Ĭinema can be an entirely magical medium. Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer with director Luca Guadagnino on the set of Call Me by Your Name. Guadagnino, like his idol Luchino Visconti, the great Italian film director of The Leopard and Death in Venice fame, is a stickler for these micro-devilish details. “Who could possibly spot the small cursive prices in liras on the shop windows?” I asked Peter Spears, the producer. The square, I was told, was retrofitted for 1983. The signs in the shop windows bore prices for food and clothing in liras, not euros one of the billboards sported a very dated Communist Party poster a boxy, old, gray Fiat stood away from the square, and against the wall of the small café, I spotted an obsolete red Illy coffee sign. Meanwhile, I was shown around the piazza. All three greeted me warmly before going back to discussing a scene for which everyone was busily setting up. Right away, I knew that very little in the film would correspond to my novel and, like any author, was wistfully resigned to watching my story morph under someone else’s vision.īefore me stood the two lead actors, Timothée Chalamet (Elio, in the film) and Armie Hammer (Oliver), and the director Luca Guadagnino. Here in Italy’s landlocked Lombardy region there was no sea whatsoever, nor even a telltale hint of a breeze in the air and, drenched under an intensely blinding noonday sun, the square felt spookily deserted.
The town square I imagined was far smaller and stood high on a hill overlooking a windswept Mediterranean.
This was not the kind of piazza I had pictured when writing Call Me by Your Name years earlier. At the center of the piazza was a World War I monument, and tucked away in a corner was a tiny café. I was tired, jet-lagged, and needed an hour to rest, but my driver took me directly to a square in the town of Pandino where the film crew was assembled and preparing for a shoot. I arrived on the film set of Call Me by Your Name an hour after landing in Milan.
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